[There are two virtual commonplaces] about the art of Vladimir Nabokov: that it is anti-realistic or anti-mimetic, and therefore a deliberate reproach to the Great Tradition of the nineteenth-century novel; that its major subject is art itself, which makes it a supreme example of what we now call metafiction. (p. 439)

Surely his own books reject the conventions of realism for a deliberate and even exaggerated artifice, an art about different conceptions of art. Such, at least, is the conventional wisdom apparently sanctioned by Nabokov himself.

It will not be my intention to recast Nabokov as a Realist, one of George Eliot's more unlikely descendants, but I do wish to argue that the conventional view of Nabokov's art is misleading in two crucial respects. The first is that it offers a monolithic theory so far as Nabokov's novels are concerned, implying as it does that all of the novels are best characterized as metafictions, parafictions, fabulations, etc. Indeed, this theory implies that a late work such as Pale Fire (1962) or Ada (1969) is an adequate model for all of Nabokov's seventeen novels, that Nabokov's long career as a novelist was devoted to a single fictional form or mode—fabulation, let us say—and that his later (English) novels differ from his earlier (Russian) works only in terms of relative development or maturity. I believe that at least seven of Nabokov's Russian and two of his English novels are seriously misrepresented by this view. Quite simply, there is greater diversity—formal diversity—in Nabokov's canon than the popular view suggests. (p. 441)

Those who assume that Nabokov is always and everywhere an artificer do so, at least in part, because they think his rejection of realism left him no option except fabulation. There may be other fictional possibilities, however, which Nabokov has in fact exploited.

It seems clear that Nabokov altogether hated literary realism as an historical movement, one best represented by the great nineteenth-century novelists in Russia, France, and England. Indeed, his contempt for the major artists of this period appears on just about every page of his published opinions. And if we can accept George Levine's summary of what literary realism has stood for during the last one hundred and fifty years [from his essay "Realism Reconsidered"], we can easily see why Nabokov loathed this movement: "Among other things, it has, surely, implied that ordinariness is more real—at least more representative and therefore truthful—than heroism, that people are morally mixed rather than either good or bad, that the firmest realities are objects rather than ideas or imaginings." Imagine Vladimir Nabokov writing in praise of "ordinariness"! Given his views on life and art, Nabokov's attitude toward the great "realistic" period in literature is almost absurdly predictable.

It is less obvious why Nabokov should have dismissed realism as a literary method. The crucial point is that Nabokov quarreled with the epistemological assumptions underlying literary realism fully as much as with the social and philosophical ideas of the great realists. Nabokov believed that "reality is an infinite succession of steps, levels of perception, false bottoms, and hence unquenchable, unattainable."… He remarked in his afterword to Lolita that "reality" is "one of the few words which mean nothing without quotes."… (p. 442)

[It is generally held that] traditional fiction is primarily devoted to the creation of character. It is a commonplace—and rightly so—that fabulation subordinates the element of character in order to emphasize artistic design for its own sake or for the didactic ends we associate with fables, parables, and allegories. Those who argue that Nabokov is everywhere a "puppeteer" assume, in effect, that his novels are not organized to trace the good or bad fortunes of those "galley slaves," his fictional characters.

My own view is that slightly more than half of Nabokov's novels are organized to do precisely that. I refer to Mary (1926), King, Queen, Knave (1928), The Defense (1930), The Eye (1930), Glory (1932), Laughter in the Dark (1933), Despair (1936), Lolita (1955), and Pnin (1957). These novels may not be "realistic" in terms of the definitions offered above, but they do seem to me represented actions. This means that they are novels in which Nabokov's famous "artifice" is either severely restricted or assimilated into the work primarily to illuminate its characters and their fates. In practice this means that the fictional worlds of these novels are self-contained and not subject to the authorial intrusions which mark—and often distinguish—Nabokov's truly fabulistic fictions. (p. 443)

Invitation to a Beheading and Bend Sinister are, as Andrew Field has remarked of Invitation, "the most patently fable-like of Nabokov's novels" [see CLC, Vol. 1]. They are also, of course, the most self-consciously artificial of the novels prior to Pale Fire. We see this most clearly in the insubstantiality of their fictional personae…. [After] any number of direct authorial intrusions Nabokov ends Invitation by permitting Cincinnatus to escape his fated beheading simply by willing that he should survive, then stops the action of Bend Sinister fully nine pages from the end in order to describe the room in which he is writing the book and to comment on the denouement—two of literature's more blatantly "unrealistic" conclusions. (p. 444)

[In King, Queen, Knave] Nabokov introduces a character named Goldemar who has written a play called King, Queen, Knave in which the god of chance is depicted "in the role of a novelist or a playwright" …—perhaps an anthropomorphic deity? Indeed, throughout the novel we hear talk of a movie version of Goldemar's King, Queen, Knave, which no doubt will bear a conspicuous resemblance to the novel we have been reading. This use of plays-within-novels, or movies-within-novels, is usually seen as an unmistakable sign of Nabokov's fabled puppeteering…. Like the dramatis personae in Invitation to a Beheading and Bend Sinister, these characters would seem to be walking clichés we can only compare to the mannikins—real machines and unreal people—in King, Queen, Knave. The "reality" of these characters is so slight, it seems altogether appropriate for Nabokov to shatter the illusion of fictional verisimilitude, as when he and his wife, anticipating Hitchcock, make "visits of inspection" at the end of King, Queen, Knave, or when Nabokov, in his role as anthropomorphic deity, refers to the lovers of that novel as "our two farcical schemers."… (pp. 444-45)

However "generated," Invitation is indeed formally different from the novels which preceded it. The crucial point, I think, is that Nabokov never really "shatters" fictional verisimilitude in his early works…. Nabokov's caustic commentary seems to be an anti-realistic device because we have somehow come to assume that authorial sympathy, or identification with the hero, is a corollary of literary realism, whereas in Nabokov's novels, as Strother Purdy has reminded us, "we must face Nabokov's scorn for his characters." Because his early novels are peopled by characters for whom dislike or scorn, and not identification, is the proper response, Nabokov creates an unmistakable "distance" between his characters and his audience; indeed, this effect is fashioned line by line, cumulatively, and cannot be disentangled from the texture of Nabokov's early novels. Because we identify extreme aesthetic distance with the art of the fabulator, it is not hard to see how the early novels have been identified with the later ones.

Nonetheless, the difference between Nabokov's early and late novels is crucial. To insist on this distinction is not to deny Nabokov's palpable dislike for his early protagonists …; this dislike helps explain why most readers prefer Nabokov's English to his Russian novels, for there is a distinct chilliness to the early works. One wonders why Nabokov should have employed so much technical skill simply to expose the "farcical" plots his early characters are forever concocting. At the same time, certain formal distinctions must be honored if we are to avoid misinterpreting specific works. [Dabney] Stuart is wrong, for example, when he argues that the "novelistic" texture of Laughter in the Dark is violated by the constant comparison of the characters to cinematic types. As [Andrew] Field has remarked, it is the characters, not Nabokov, who "cinematize" the novel, who think of themselves as movie stars and therefore commit themselves to acting out the hackneyed fates of their idols. Nabokov's treatment of this process is pitiless, but in the crucial sense of the term it is novelistic; that is, it traces a coherent and causally-related series of episodes in which the characters, however unattractive, are the constant center of interest. Nabokov's ironies are directed at the illusions of his characters, not the "methods of composition" by which they are delineated. (pp. 445-46)

Over the years Lolita has inspired a few intelligent discussions which have implicitly treated the book as a novel of character. These readings have suggested that Lolita deals centrally with Humbert's fantastic attempt to incarnate an impossible, atemporal vision of imperishable bliss…. [The] question is indeed central to Nabokov's achievement and deserves the full consideration it never gets when Lolita is treated as an "involuted" fiction.

I would add that the question of Humbert's growth is often simplified by failing to consider his incorrigible game-playing. Whether or not we agree with [Alfred] Appel's overall approach to Lolita [see CLC, Vol. 1], we must somehow explain the verbal gymnastics he points to. Humbert's use of "Aubrey McFate" is quite revealing in this regard. Humbert's little joke asserts his superiority to fate—because he can still "laugh" at it, indeed trivialize it—while it also calls attention to the "fact" that as a victim of fate he should be relieved of all moral responsibility. (pp. 451-52)

[It] should be apparent that our reading [of Lolita] depends on how we have responded to Nabokov's protagonist throughout the book. Appel's approach to Lolita, taken far enough, leads to such descriptions of the novel as Julia Bader's: "moral taboo merges with literary taboo, and we get the supreme object of literary originality posing as the main character of a novel about literary originality."… My argument is that the nature of our involvement with Humbert, as well as with the other characters, will not support the conclusion that Lolita is "about" literary originality, creative language, art in general, or any similar abstraction. The novel's so-called involutions are not merely doubtful; in so far as we interpret them as such, they divert us from what is most profoundly appealing in an art which is complex and sophisticated but thoroughly traditional in its basic ends. Anyone who thinks that this is a sentimental approach to Lolita should consider Nabokov's remarks about his title character…. [Humbert] must be shown in all his human complexity. He must be shown, in fact, in precisely the manner Nabokov adopted in presenting Humbert Humbert. (p. 454)

Pale Fire differs from Lolita in that it focuses on general questions of belief rather than the particularized fates of its characters. Shade and Kinbote are sufficiently interesting that it is all too easy to overlook the fact that Nabokov has made no real effort to develop them in the manner of Humbert Humbert or Pnin. Douglas Fowler has noticed that Kinbote is an especially "inconsistent" character, the vehicle of Nabokov's most farcical humor … but also for a number of suspiciously Nabokovian speeches…. Fowler notes that Kinbote is an impossibly "complicated" character, one whose alternating foolishness and Nabokovian wisdom cannot be reconciled, and I would agree. This is not an artistic failure on Nabokov's part …, but rather a conspicuous sign that Nabokov's intentions here are not those of a realistic or traditional novelist. No less than Gradus, Shade and Kinbote function in Pale Fire like those inspired puppets Appel sees everywhere in Nabokov's canon. To focus on the complications of their "story" is, I think, to conclude with Fowler that Nabokov has simply failed. Given the novel's obvious brilliance, such a conclusion declares its own bankruptcy.

Nabokov's treatment of character forces us to look elsewhere for the novel's controlling principle. This doesn't require that we look to Nabokov's general beliefs, but the book's peculiar organization strongly suggests that we should do so. Indeed, we are perplexed by the structure of Pale Fire long before we come to understand the nature of its characterizations. The novel's parts are those of a scholarly edition, of course, consisting here of John Shade's last poem, "Pale Fire," and the introduction, commentary, and index of his good "friend" and colleague, Charles Kinbote. The parody of a critical edition is so broad, however, beginning with the first page of Kinbote's incredible introduction, that we are immediately confronted with the question of what this book is really about. This question is all the more compelling as we move through the novel's several parts and discover that there is almost literally no connection between poem and commentary. We are forced to do one of two things. Either we must abandon the book as a hopeless muddle, or we must try to put it together as something other than Kinbote's "critical" edition…. It seems to me that we must inevitably consider the novel's structural oddities in a different, rather more intellectual light. That is, we must ask ourselves what such a poem and such a commentary have in common. Why has Nabokov juxtaposed these apparently independent artifacts? As a critical commentary on Shade's "Pale Fire," Kinbote's notes are of course utter nonsense; finally they are as different from John Shade's poem as Kinbote is different from Shade. But the problem with this observation is that many readers have been very much taken with Kinbote's story of the fantastic Zemblan revolution. The commentary may have nothing to do with "Pale Fire," but it can be seen as a considerable achievement in its own right. Indeed, it can be seen as a work of art. Here, of course, we come upon the connection between poem and commentary. Different as they are, the two are nonetheless related as works of art, the products of radically different and yet equally compelling artistic imaginations. (pp. 456-58)

[Pale Fire calls for analytical reading], not the vague generalizations about "art" which Nabokov's fabulations usually inspire…. [Our] general understanding of this very great writer and his several works is radically imperfect, based as it is on our inadequate grasp of his various formal ends. We will never get to the bottom of Nabokov, just as we will never know the origin of life, but whatever understanding we can achieve will come from approaching his work in a more flexible manner than has been the case since Nabokov ceased to be, in his own words, "an obscure, doubly obscure, novelist with an unpronounceable name."… (p. 462)